Reverse Debugging Research Articles

An Axiomatic Theory for Reversible Computation

Undoing computations of a concurrent system is beneficial in many situations, such as in reversible debugging of multi-threaded programs and in recovery from errors due to optimistic execution in parallel discrete event simulation. A number of approaches have been proposed for how to reverse formal models of concurrent computation, including process calculi such as CCS, languages like Erlang, and abstract models such as prime event structures and occurrence nets. However, it has not been settled as to what properties a reversible system should enjoy, nor how the various properties that have been suggested, such as the parabolic lemma and the causal-consistency property, are related. We contribute to a solution to these issues by using a generic labelled transition system equipped with a relation capturing whether transitions are independent to explore the implications between various reversibility properties. In particular, we show how all properties we consider are derivable from a set of axioms. Our intention is that when establishing properties of some formalism, it will be easier to verify the axioms rather than proving properties such as the parabolic lemma directly. We also introduce two new properties related to causal-consistent reversibility, namely causal liveness and causal safety, stating, respectively, that an action can be undone if (causal liveness) and only if (causal safety) it is independent from all of the following actions. These properties come in three flavours: defined in terms of independent transitions, independent events, or via an ordering on events. Both causal liveness and causal safety are derivable from our axioms.

Reversible debugging of concurrent Erlang programs: Supporting imperative primitives

Reversible computing is a programming paradigm allowing one to execute programs both in the standard, forward direction as well as backwards, recovering past states. A relevant application of reversible computing is causal-consistent reversible debugging, which allows one to explore concurrent computations backwards and forwards to find a bug. The basic idea is that any action can be undone, provided that its consequences are undone beforehand. This approach has been put into practice in CauDEr, a Causal-consistent reversible Debugger for the Erlang programming language. CauDEr provides the ability to explore a concurrent computation back and forward in a step-by-step way as well as to undo an action far in the past including all and only its consequences (rollback), and to replay an action from a log, together with its causes. CauDEr supports the functional, concurrent and distributed fragment of Erlang. However, Erlang also includes imperative primitives to manage a map (shared among all the processes of a same node) associating process identifiers to names. Here we extend CauDEr and the related theory, including rollback and replay, to support such imperative primitives. From a theoretical point of view, the imperative primitives create different causal structures to those derived from the concurrent Erlang fragment previously handled in CauDEr, yet we show that the main results proved for previous versions of CauDEr are still valid. From a practical point of view, this allows one to debug a larger subset of Erlang programs, as shown with a small case study of a server providing mathematical functionalities.

Reversible Computing in Debugging of Erlang Programs

Reversible computation is a computing paradigm where execution can progress backward as well as in the usual, forward direction. It has found applications in many areas of computer science, such as circuit design, programing languages, simulation, modeling of biochemical reactions, debugging, and robotics. In this article, we give an overview of reversible computation focusing on its use in reversible debugging of concurrent programs written in the Erlang programing language.

Causal-Consistent Replay Reversible Semantics for Message Passing Concurrent Programs

Causal-consistent reversible debugging is an innovative technique for debugging concurrent systems. It allows one to go back in the execution focusing on the actions that most likely caused a visible misbehavior. When such an action is selected, the debugger undoes it, including all and only its consequences. This operation is called a causal-consistent rollback. In this way, the user can avoid being distracted by the actions of other, unrelated processes. In this work, we introduce its dual notion: causal-consistent replay. We allow the user to record an execution of a running program and, in contrast to traditional replay debuggers, to reproduce a visible misbehavior inside the debugger including all and only its causes. Furthermore, we present a unified framework that combines both causal-consistent replay and causal-consistent rollback. Although most of the ideas that we present are rather general, we focus on a popular functional and concurrent programming language based on message passing: Erlang.

Transition Watchpoints: Teaching Old Debuggers New Tricks

Reversible debuggers and process replay have been developed at least since 1970. This vision enables one to execute backwards in time under a debugger. Two important problems in practice are that, first, current reversible debuggers are slow when reversing over long time periods, and, second, after building one reversible debugger, it is difficult to transfer that achievement to a new programming environment. The user observes a bug when arriving at an error. Searching backwards for the corresponding fault may require many reverse steps. Ultimately, the user prefers to write an expression that will transition to false upon arriving at the fault. The solution is an expression-transition watchpoint facility based on top of snapshots and record/replay. Expression-transition watch- points are implemented as binary search through the timeline of a program execution, while using the snapshots as landmarks within that timeline. This allows for debugging of subtle bugs that appear only after minutes or more of program execution. When a bug occurs within seconds of program startup, repeated debugging sessions suffice. Reversible debugging is preferred for bugs seen only after minutes. This architecture allows for an efficient and easy-to-write snapshot-based reversibe debugger on top of a conventional debugger. The validity of this approach was tested by developing four personalities (for GDB, MATLAB, Perl, and Python), with each personality typically requiring just 100 lines of code.

Improving the performance of reverse debugging

Reverse debugging is the software development technique that effectively helps fix bugs occurring at the nondeterministic program behavior. It allows one to examine the past states of the program without rerunning it. An implementation of reverse debugging based on deterministic replay in the QEMU 2.0 emulator is described. A number of techniques improving the debugging performance due to reducing the amount of saved data, optimized storage of system snapshots, indexing, and compressing of the event log are proposed. The emulator can work together with the interactive GDB debugger, which makes it possible to use the reverse-continue, reverse-nexti, reverse-stepi and reverse-finish commands in the course of debugging. The execution time of these commands depends on the frequency of recording the system's state snapshots. An estimate of the optimal frequency for the reverse-continue command is obtained.

Debugging hardware designs using dynamic dependency graphs

Debugging is a time consuming task in hardware design. In this paper a new debugging approach based on the analysis of dynamic dependency graphs is presented. Powerful techniques for software debugging, including reverse debugging, dynamic forward and backward slicing, and spectrum-based fault localization are combined and adapted for hardware designs. A case study on designs with multiple faults approved the power of the proposed debugging methodology reducing the debugging time to 50% in comparison to conventional techniques.

Debugging Parallel DEVS

To this day, debugging support for the DEVS formalism has been provided, at best, in an ad-hoc way. The intricacies of dealing with the interplay of different notions of (simulated) time, formalism semantics, and user input have not been thoroughly investigated. This paper presents a visual modeling, simulation, and debugging environment for Parallel DEVS, which builds on a theoretical foundation for debugging DEVS models. We take inspiration from both code debugging and the simulation world to model our environment; we transpose a set of useful code debugging concepts onto Parallel DEVS, and combine those with simulation-specific operations, such as as-fast-as-possible simulation and (scaled) real-time execution. Apart from these common debugging operations, we introduce new features to the debugging of Parallel DEVS models, such as “god events,” which can alter the model state during simulation, and reversible debugging, which allows one to go back in time. To achieve this, the PythonPDEVS simulator is deconstructed and reconstructed: the modal part of the simulator–debugger, as well as the debugging operations, are modeled using the Statecharts formalism. These models are combined, resulting in a model of the timed, reactive behavior of a debuggable simulator for Parallel DEVS. The code for the simulator is automatically synthesized from this model. To improve usability, we combine the simulator with a visual modeling environment, allowing for visual and interactive live debugging.

Подходы к представлению результатов анализа сетевого трафика

The article proposes different methods of presenting network traffic analysis results, the need for which arises primarily in the area of network security. One of the most important tasks is to identify malicious traffic. For this purpose both the complete graph of network interactions and time-based packet diagram are presented. These components are used during investigation of information security violation incidents. The timing diagram is also used in analysis of tunneling protocols because it allows the analyst to determine which protocol headers are necessary to visualize. For tasks associated with reverse engineering and debugging of network protocols, it is proposed to use a journal which records protocol header parsing errors. Presented graphic components either have no analogues among the opensource tools or improve on existing opensource solutions.

Методы повышения производительности обратной отладки

Reverse debugging is software development technique that effectively helps to fix bugs caused by nondeterministic program behavior. It allows inspecting past program’s state without rerun. The paper describes implementation of software reverse debugging using deterministic replay based on the QEMU emulator. We present ways to improve debugging performance by reducing saved data, using copy-on-write snapshots’ format and indexing/compressing of replay log. QEMU supports a common user interface for reverse debugging in GDB debugger which allows using reverse-continue, reverse-nexti, reverse-stepi and reverse-finish commands. Time required for these commands’ execution depends on taking snapshots frequency in recording replay log. This paper also presents assessment of snapshots frequency for better performance.

Reversible debugging using program instrumentation

Reversible execution has not been fully exploited in symbolic debuggers. Debuggers that can undo instructions usually incur a significant performance penalty during a debugging session. We describe an efficient reversible debugging mechanism based on program instrumentation. The approach enables repetitive debugging sessions with selectable reversible routines and recording modes. Experimental results indicate that the execution penalty can be significantly reduced with moderate code growth.